Six invoices with last year's date on them

I invoiced the same client, once a month, from an Apple Pages template somebody handed me.

The loop was: open last month's invoice, File → Duplicate, change the date, change the invoice number, change the line, export a PDF, then write an email whose subject line I also copied from last month. Ten minutes, start to finish. It never occurred to me to replace it.

Then January came, and I duplicated December's invoice, and left the old year sitting in the date field. February's invoice was a duplicate of January's, so it inherited the mistake. So did March's. By the time somebody at the client's end asked me about it — politely, and about the sixth one — I had sent six invoices dated a year before I wrote them.

A copy is a very good copy of the wrong thing

The reflex is to call this carelessness, and the fix care. That is the wrong diagnosis, and I know it is wrong because I was being careful.

Every field in a duplicated invoice is correct. It is correct as of last month. The date is the previous date, the number is the previous number, and nothing in a word processor knows that this document is a tax invoice, that its number is supposed to be one nobody has used, or that its date is supposed to be roughly today. The file has no memory of what it was copied from and no opinion about what it says.

What makes the date the field that goes wrong, rather than the amount, is where your attention is. You check the amount, because the amount is the money. The date sits up in the corner looking exactly the way it looked last month — which is the only way you would ever notice it had changed, and it hadn't.

The year is the worst version of this, because eleven months out of twelve the mistake is invisible. Duplicating a December invoice in January is the one moment in the year when a field you have never had to think about quietly becomes wrong, and then stays wrong until somebody reads it more carefully than you did.

The other two, which nobody flagged

Invoice numbers. Same mechanism. I have sent two invoices carrying the same number, and I have skipped numbers, and both surfaced weeks later when I was trying to reconcile a list of documents that could not agree with itself. Nobody chased me about those. They were mine to untangle either way.

Email subject lines. The email is a copy too. So there were months where the subject line named one invoice number and the PDF attached to it carried another — a document and its covering note disagreeing about what the document was.

None of these are interesting mistakes. That is rather the point. They are the specific, boring errors a copy-and-edit workflow produces on a schedule, and no amount of proofreading gets rid of them, because the proofreading is not what is missing.

Nobody chose this workflow

Here is the part I think matters most, and it is the part I am least proud of: I never evaluated Apple Pages against anything. I was told to invoice with Pages and handed a template. That was the process. It arrived with the contract the way a timesheet format does, and I used it.

So the natural question — why didn't you just use invoicing software? — assumes a decision I never made. There was no comparison and no trial. There was a file that produced a PDF, and a job that took ten minutes a month, and no reason to go looking for a second opinion about it.

That is how a failure like this survives. A tool you chose is one you can reconsider, because you had reasons and reasons can be revisited. A tool you were handed is just how invoicing is done. It took six wrong dates in a row, and somebody else pointing at them, before it occurred to me that the file might be the problem rather than me.

The tools that would have caught all of this do exist. They also want to be your accounting system — a chart of accounts, bank feeds, reconciliation, a monthly subscription — which is a great deal of product for one document a month sent to one client. That is the actual gap: the cheapest thing that produces an invoice validates nothing, and the next thing up is a ledger a one-person business never asked for.

What a program knows that a document doesn't

Bilby is the small thing in that gap: a program that knows what a tax invoice is, and not much else.

Concretely, against the errors above:

• The issue date is today's, and is never carried forward from a previous invoice. There is no field to leave a stale year in, because nothing copies one.
• A number you have already used is refused — refused outright, not warned about — and the last number you used is shown beside the field, so the next one is a matter of reading rather than remembering. In the free tier you still type the number yourself; Bilby's job is to make sure it is not already one of yours.
• Client details come from the saved client rather than from retyping them, which takes out the transcription errors I have not bothered to list here.
• The five things the ATO requires for a tax invoice are checked as you type, and Bilby will not issue a document missing any of them. A document missing one is just an invoice, and the business you sent it to cannot claim the GST credit on it.

The honest part

I should say plainly that I have not proved anybody else has this problem. I went looking. People in public forums complain about being paid late, constantly, and about chasing clients, and about tax. They do not complain about producing incorrect invoices. The two contractors I have spoken to so far already use a tool rather than a word processor.

So this is not a story about a widespread pain I discovered. It is a story about a specific, repeatable, documented failure of my own — one I did not choose my way into, and did not catch until somebody else did — which I am fixing for myself first and building in the open in case it turns out to be yours as well.